In 2002 the Danish Minister of Environment initiated a process to investigate the possibilities of establishing national parks in Denmark. For this purpose experts were mobilised to investigate the status and potentials of the areas in question. The national park process was extensive in scope and complex, and in theory such complexity is assumed to make it difficult for non-experts to understand all the relevant aspects of policy. This exclusion of non-experts may lead to scientification of politics.

The area of production under greenhouses has been in rapid growth in recent years, and at present there are over 500,000ha scattered all over the world. Due to the vast amount of inputs (water, fertilizers, fuel, etc.) required, and outputs of various agricultural residues (vegetable waste, plastic sheeting, phytosanitary product containers, etc.), the impact of this type of production system to the environment is considerable in particular if pursued without a sound and sustainable territorial planning.

Landscape: stake and tool for land use planning. For last decades, landscape has gradually become a stake of land use planning in Europe. The European Landscape Convention formalizes landscape as an issue of general interest and promotes a democratic landscape planning. However, landscape is rarely in practice the subject of pluridisciplinary and concerted approaches. So land use planning searches for a landscape concept able to gather together the various disciplinary and societal points of view. This federative concept can help it to build concerted policies of landscape planning.

Landscape: stake and tool for land use planning. For last decades, landscape has gradually become a stake of land use planning in Europe. The European Landscape Convention formalizes landscape as an issue of general interest and promotes a democratic landscape planning. However, landscape is rarely in practice the subject of pluridisciplinary and concerted approaches. So land use planning searches for a landscape concept able to gather together the various disciplinary and societal points of view. This federative concept can help it to build concerted policies of landscape planning.

Recent increases in the price of oil have generated much interest in biofuel development but the social and environmental impacts of large scale adoption of biofuels at both regional and national scales remain understudied, especially in developing economies. Although the recent swings in prices for oil may slow down these surges in supply and demand, production of biofuels from food remain profitable above $50/barrel making the biofuel market viable.

As urban development continues to encroach on the natural and rural landscape, land-use planners struggle to identify high priority conservation areas for protection. Although knowing where urban-sensitive species may be occurring on the landscape would facilitate conservation planning, research efforts are often not sufficiently designed to make quality predictions at unknown locations. Recent advances in occupancy modeling allow for more precise estimates of occupancy by accounting for differences in detectability.